Are Trulia and Zillow and Realtor.com the Best Place to Search for Santa Barbara CA Real Estate? - NO!!
categories: Buyer's Resources & Advice, Random Thoughts & Opinions
Over the last year I have been in contact with numerous people that have been spending their time searching for Santa Barbara Real Estate on sites such as Trulia.com, Realtor.com and Zillow.com. To me this is understandable since they are all powerhouse sites if you will, have loads of advertising behind them and overall do a pretty OK job for certain things.
The problem I have with being a consumer/customer is that these sites represent a sort of Wal-Mart approach…meaning they try and do cover most everything, but not in the greatest depth, detail, expertise and accuracy. Sure, if you are looking to buy a bicycle you can go into any Wal-Mart and buy a bicycle (I guess…I’ve never looked), but if you are looking for a very specific bike and true expertise on say the components and what not, most all of us would choose to research the specific bike online from the manufacturers website and also visit your local expert shop that has several knowledgeable riders completely in tune with the gear etc.
So why are many people taking the Wal-Mart approach when looking to make most likely their biggest financial purchase in their life…buying a home?
Zillow.com claims that they have over 3,000,000 listings on their site. Realtor.com claims they have over 4,000,000. Trulia.com does not publish this, but I am sure it is a large number.
If you are looking to buy real estate here in the Santa Barbara and Montecito CA area, do you really care that Trulia.com, Realtor.com and Zillow.com have on their site over 15,000 homes in Denver, Colorado for sale or north of 12,000 homes for sale in the Seattle, Washington area?
OK…so you still like the look and feel of these sites, knowing that “others” use them, the random poll on the sidebar, the paid advertisements that blink at you…who knows? BUT…Are you actually getting out of them what you are ultimately looking for???
- All the Listings For Sale
- Information on Past Sales to Draw Comparisons
- True Local Knowledge about Numerous Topics Relating to your Decision
Let’s take a look at the first point…the listings themselves.
The local Santa Barbara Multiple Listing Service (MLS) is the only database that will have every home that is listed by all the real estate brokerages in town. The only way to then access all of this in the Santa Barbara CA area is to be in contact with a Realtor or to use a local IDX from a Realtor’s site. This will then give you the highest chance of seeing all that is out there. With that said, there are also pocket listings that are constantly available in towns such as Santa Barbara and Montecito as well as great homes (great buys) that do sell before they are even marketed and/or hit the local MLS.
Here is a glance at listings available on various sites when you type in “Santa Barbara CA” into the Search Box: (for April 22nd, 2009)
The Santa Barbara Real Estate Voice IDX that I have being a member of the local Santa Barbara MLS is a direct data feed from the MLS. It has also been thoughtfully organized to truly represent the exact areas in our town…very little lumping together and overlapping that often occurs on Zillow etc. (hence 625 homes for sale in “Goleta”, when this is just tons of overlapping of Santa Barbara proper).
If you don’t want to miss upwards of 20-30% of the homes that are listed in our area, not counting pocket listings and upcoming great buys, you should contact a good, ethical, hard-working Realtor.
These national listing sites have their own place and I think they do provide consumers with tools and information…all great things. I am not trying to bash them in any way. But, if the prices are the same, you will get much more accurate, complete, hands-on information from a local IDX and hardworking Realtor than going at it on your own on a big aggregate site.
Regarding point #2 - comparisons of past sales, please feel free to contact me. Regarding point #3, please visit my site and feel free to contact me regarding any questions or needs.
Further Reading:
- A Few Noticeable Trends in Santa Barbara Real Estate - April 2009
- Is Zillow’s Zestimate a Reliable Guide to your Santa Barbara Home’s Value?
- Working with a Blogging Realtor - Advantages
For information on Real Estate here in Santa Barbara, Montecito and/or our surrounding areas, as well as any other aspects of life in our area, please don’t hesitate to contact Kevin Schmidtchen at Sotheby’s Int’l Realty.
Thank you for reading. I hope you find Santa Barbara Real Estate Voice informative. Please feel free to contact me or comment below with any thoughts.
Subscribe to Receive Personal Listings of Santa Barbara Real Estate
Search The Santa Barbara Area MLS
| Discussion:
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
; ?>/images/MatoChiclet.gif)
Would that Trulia and Zillow would publish these facts (if they really wanted to help consumers and agents).
Alas, I think they found a loophole in the transparency code.
This is interesting reading. I find the stats regarding realtor.com particularly interesting in that I thought they got their info directly from our mls. Thanks Kevin.
Spencer from Zillow here,
I too am surprised that Realtor.com had fewer than the IDX site. Their whole schtick is that they have MLS connectivity so they have “all” the listings.
I just did a search on Zillow for Santa Barbara and we have 859 homes for sale including 13 FSBOs (which probably aren’t on Realtor.com or on an IDX site), and 101 “Make Me Move” homes which are only on Zillow.
There’s no doubt that, for now, there are some listings that are on an IDX site that aren’t on Zillow. But there are also listings on Zillow which aren’t on an IDX site.
If I had a friend looking for a home in Santa Barbara, I’d advise them to use Zillow and an IDX site such as yours.
Kevin, the bigger question is: given how poorly Trulia did in your survey, why do you have the “view my profile on trulia” link but you don’t have your Zillow badge on this site? Looks like you’ve used Zillow Advice a bit in the past — thank you. There are some good threads in there, just waiting for an agent like you to go and answer…
http://www.zillow.com/advice/santa-barbara/all/question-discussion-guide/
Jfsellsius…who knows. Your guess is as good as anyone. Thanks for commenting…take care
Greg…things change quickly so maybe if you type in one hour later it changes…that is my guess.
Spencer…thanks for the thoughts. Personally I think zillow has its place for certain people. It provides good tools to certain people. We are all different.
My experience unfortunately has not been great with zillow and many others who I talk to have the same thoughts. I have sent a few emails to ask zillow questions and get no responses. You also have to be a genius to find a zillow phone number…this is a pet peeve with me. Not the customer service that I would hope for and expect. On top of this, RE happens quickly much of the time and you need relatively instant info.
Regarding FSBO’s we get these lists as well, they are just not on my site as the vary so much in so many ways. So if someone is working with a local Realtor that is on top of the market they know about these as well. Again, in our town there are additionally a fair amount of pocket listings and sellers that would sell that you would never get from a big aggregate site.
As far as the make me move listings…to me this is a marketing thing/ploy. Basically is says to me…buyer if you want to overpay, here is your price. I would be happy to point out all of them in Santa Barbara if you would like. Let me know if you think differently.
I also have a hard time with how to promote myself on Zillow. It seems to me that many agents come up way ahead of me that I am shocked about. Not sure the formulas for these, but some people have 99 years experience and thus come up first in Santa Barbara???? The first 5 agents that come up under Santa Barbara for the listings tab are basically non existent in Santa Barbara…they all do business in other areas. So to me this is not helpful at all to the consumer and is not controlled by zillow. Let me know if you have thoughts.
Take care
Hi Kevin,
On the customer care issue (and our lack of a phone #), we do have a phone number for those that want to buy ads from us: (866) 324-4005. It’s posted on the site in the Advertiser section. We choose to do our customer care in the Advice forums though so that more than one person can benefit from the answers to the questions raised. Still, I agree that it can be frustrating. In the future, you can always feel free to email me (spencer@zillow.com) and I’ll help.
On Make Me Moves, the average gap between a MMM and a Zestimate is about 15%, so while there are clearly outliers I’d say that on the whole the Make Me Move prices are pretty much “in play”. In my neighborhood in Seattle, there are about a dozen legit MMM homes that have reasonable prices posted on them. A buyer who wants to live in this specific neighborhood would definitely be well-served to consider Make Me Move homes here. I don’t know the Santa Barbara market as well (though I do hold a secret desire to live there some day, and I visited many times when I lived in LA). I did check our traffic stats for Santa Barbara and in March09 we got 30,270 total visitors (which translates to about 20,000 unique visitors), up 51% over Mar08 for the Santa Barbara area. I suspect that puts Zillow among the 2 or 3 most visited real estate sites in Santa Barbara. It stands to reason that there are at least some legit Make Me Move homes that buyers’ agents should consider for their clients.
In terms of how to promote yourself better on Zillow, either Sara Bonert (director of broker services) or I will follow up with a separate comment here.